Righteous Blog
Porcine Drug Problems
Monday, March 16th, 2009
Righteous Porkchop describes in some detail industrial animal production’s serious drug addiction. The book traces the origin of the problem to the 1950s when it became commonplace to add antibiotics and other drugs to the daily feed of poultry. This was done both to stimulate faster animal growth and to control diseases, which were an increasingly daunting problem in ever-more crowded, unsanitary poultry operations.
However, as Righteous Porkchop explains, there are serious negative consequences to over-using antibiotics on farm animals. Over the past week, famed New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has written two pieces about the results of over-using antibiotics in pork production. Kristof describes his visit to a Midwest farming town with industrial pork operations in which a high percentage of residents have a particularly scary antibiotic resistant infection known as “MRSA.” The most recent of these pieces was in the Sunday times, called Pathogens in our Pork. Sunday evening Kristof posted a blog supplementing his columns, in which he recommends several additional resources on this subject. The first of these is Righteous Porkchop.
The good news in all of this is that, as with so many other problems connected with industrial animal production, antibiotic feeding can be stopped. On good animal farms, in which animals are provided a healthy environment and access to exercise and the outdoors, antibiotics are almost unneeded. The pig farmers who make up Niman Ranch, the natural meat company founded by my husband, Bill Niman, has never allowed the feeding of antibiotics. Of course, we have also never engaged in the practice here on our own ranch. Healthy animal farming simply does not require antibiotics in daily feed or water. Antibiotic resistant diseases are just one more reason America must move away from industrial animal production.
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